On Thu, Mar 14, 2019 at 10:37:46AM +0000, Simon McVittie wrote: > On Thu, 14 Mar 2019 at 10:21:30 +0100, Santiago Vila wrote: > > The reason I'm often asked to add hacks to base-files.postinst is only > > that base-files is usually configured in the second place > > I think it's also fair to say that base-files is exactly a collection of > the miscellaneous files and bootstrapping actions that no other package > seems particularly responsible for, so if a new miscellaneous file or a > new bootstrapping action appears, base-files seems a reasonably natural > home for it (or at least, more natural than a package that contains > non-bootstrapping code, for example bash or debianutils).
Maybe, but this is neither a new miscellaneous file nor a new bootstrapping action. This is yet another bootstrapping tool forgetting the lessons learned from the other bootstrapping tools. Helmut Grohne wrote: > If we agree that this would be the best fix for buster, I volunteer to > write a patch for base-files to implement that. No, I do not agree, so please don't. > How is a bootstrap tool supposed to know > that it must configure base-passwd before base-files? In a theoretical level, because it's their job to know such things. In a practical level, because you already see what happens when you configure any package which uses users defined in /etc/passwd without a minimal /etc/passwd in place. Again in a practical level, once we know it, we can't pretend that we don't know it. You want to create a common framework to reuse such knowledge and share it between different bootstrapping tools? Fine, maybe then new bootstrapping tools finally realize that there must be a valid /etc/passwd before configuring anything else. But lack of such a common framework is not an excuse to ditch the definition of essential and start doing things "just in case" some new bootstrapping tool forgets again that there must be a valid /etc/passwd before configuring anything else. Please reassign to whatever bootstrapping tool is not doing its job properly. Sorry, but this is starting to annoy me. Thanks.